1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to telecommunication services which utilize video telephony. More particularly, the invention relates to the buffering or holding of video calls, in a networked environment.
2. State of the Art
In order to provide a more interactive experience, video telephony, also known herein as video conferencing, has become popular. It is commonplace for a plurality of video phones to call into a collection point which then couples all of the video phones together into a conferencing session by forming a bridge between the various video conferencing devices. However, video telephony is becoming more popular for use between a single calling party or endpoint and a single answering party or endpoint. Additionally, various applications of such point-to-point video conferencing are in practice.
One such application for point-to-point video conferencing relates to communication with hearing-impaired users who are generally highly efficient at visual communications through the use of, for example, sign language. Furthermore, systems for facilitating such communication between a hearing-impaired user and a hearing-capable user are becoming more commonplace due to various mandates. For example, under the guidance of Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, telecommunication services were mandated to provide hearing and speech impaired parties with functional equivalents of the telecommunication services afforded hearing and speech-capable parties. Accordingly, various approaches were implemented with one being a Video Relay Service (VRS). The VRS was developed to allow hearing-impaired users to converse in sign language over an imaging device with a hearing-capable user that utilizes standard telecommunication services, such as the Internet and Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).
Various implementations of establishing a communication session between a hearing-impaired party and a hearing-capable party have been proposed and implemented. Because such telecommunication services utilize resource-limited interpretive services, the incoming calls from, for example, hearing-impaired users may undergo a delay process in order to await the availability of such interpretive services. Therefore, there is a need to provide such video telephony participants with a waiting or hold environment that is informative and intuitive in form and structure.